A new study finds that wind turbines have an energy payback of 6 months, which is comparable to the best solar photovoltaic systems. In other words, in their first six months of operation, large wind turbines produce the same total amount of energy that was needed to produce and install them.

The myth that wind and solar power are bad investments from an energy-payback perspective has been around for years. It even turned up in the error-riddled 2009 book “Superfreakonomics,” repeated by Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft.

It’s difficult to compare this to the energy payback time for fossil fuel plants, because not only do they require a great deal of energy to construct and fuel, they also cause climate change and mooch off of millions of years and heat and pressure provided by the earth.

Of course, decades ago, when manufacturers had not yet applied mass-production techniques to those then-nascent technologies, the energy payback time (EPBT) of renewables was considerably worse. That’s clear from this chart in “PE Magazine,” the lead publication of the National Society of Professional Engineers.

The European Photovoltaic Industry Association says, “Depending on the type of PV system and the location of the installation, the EPBT at present is between 0.5 and 1.4 years.”

In general, the more sunlight at a solar installation the faster the energy payback. In the future, we can expect a continued improvement in energy payback. Year after year, renewable energy becomes a better and better investment.

Joe Romm is a Fellow at American Progress and is the editor of Climate Progress, which New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called "the indispensable blog" and Time magazine named one of the 25 "Best Blogs of 2010." In 2009, Rolling Stone put Romm #88 on its list of 100 "people who are reinventing America." Time named him a "Hero of the Environment″ and “The Web’s most influential ...

Wow, that is pretty amazing! 6 months is not a long period of time that you need to wait for the wind turbines to “repay” back the energy that was used to build them originally. I guess it is really remarkable and really worth building. After 6 months and when the wind turbines have harnessed enough energy in their storage, you can just use that to build yet another series of wind turbines. It is like a recurring process that I think will not incur additional costs except for the building materials and manpower needed.

By your question are you asking whether they accounted for pollution and energy use, in the sourcing of the raw materials and manufacturing of the turbines?

The summary of the article seems to indicate that this is so.

"LCA takes into account sourcing of key raw materials (steel, copper, fiberglass, plastics, concrete, and other materials), transport, manufacturing, installation of the turbine, ongoing maintenance through its anticipated two decades of useful life and, finally, the impacts of recycling and disposal at end-of-life."

Agreed, Edward. That is why we need CO2 capture and storage (CCS) on the concrete, steel and chemical plants that produce those construction and component materials. Joe Romm has publicly stated his scepticism of CCS for the fossil-fueled electric power plants. This is a fair position and there are reasonable arguments on both sides of CCS. But CCS can be usefully applied to reduce the carbon footprint of the renewables manufacturing industry as well. Certaintly everyone should be happy about that. The concrete and steel industries produce around 9-11% of global man-made CO2 emissions.

The NREL study says solar (normal solar PV, not that cheap stuff) takes about three years. I highly doubt that any PV system could even come close to wind power, especially after accounting for all aspects of the "energy trail".

They say 600kWh of electricity per sq meter for frameless "near future" crystaline silicon PV. It will average about 150 watts for about 6 hours per day for about 300 days (give or take). That's just over two years... until we account for the two thirds loss of thermal (usually from coal) required to generate the electricty. Of course, not all of the energy required is in the form of electricity, but much of it is.

Can't wait for the day when we figure how to make solar panels work at night and wind turbines work without wind... Then they (instead of fossil fuels) could generate the industrial amounts of energy to make themselves and power the growing world. In the meantime, we need some kind of standarnized reactor fleet build up.